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David Keith, professor of applied physics at Harvard University, is lead author on papers published in Nature Climate Change and Environmental Research Letters which speculate as to how we could restore the polar ice.

'The really hard questions here aren’t mostly technical. They’re questions about what kind of planet we want and who we are,' he told Canadian newspaper The Windsor Star.

Melting: These images from Nasa show reveal the full extent of Arctic ice shrinkage, showing a new record low compared to the average minimum extent over the past 30 years (in yellow)

THE DISAPPEARING ARCTIC ICE CAP

In a critical climate indicator showing an ever warming world, the amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean shrank to an all time low this summer.

The shocking new figures revealed in September showed how the ice has halved in size since the Eighties.

'We are now in uncharted territory,' said snow and ice data centre director Mark Serreze.

'While we’ve long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic, few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur.'

The ice cap at the North Pole measured 1.32million square miles, according to the new data released in September.

Scientists say this is 18 per cent smaller than the previous record of 1.61million square miles set in 2007, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado.

Records go back to 1979 based on satellite tracking.

Professor Keith used climate models to suggest that injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere could reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth, engineering a regional effect that could bring ice back to the Arctic.

His paper claims that by reducing the penetration of sunlight by just 0.5 per cent is could be possible to restore the sea-ice around the North Pole back to pre-industrial era levels.

'Decisions involving (solar radiation management) do not need to be reduced to a single "global thermostat",' the paper says.

His second paper suggests the whole operation could be accomplished with just a few modified Gulfstream jets, costing somewhere in the region of $8billion a year.

However, while he believes action must be taken to tackle the amount of pollution spewed into the Earth's atmosphere, he doesn't yet advocate the kind of action his papers suggest.

Open-air and large-scale geoengineering of the kind Professor Keith has suggested has been ruled out by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Such drastic geoengineering could have disastrous unintended effects but could be a viable response to a 'climate emergency' such as the sudden collapse of ice sheets or a killing drought, Professor Keith suggested.